Female Generations

I thought it would be fun to show some pictures just of the women in my direct line.

I start with my great grandmother, Mary Malinda Duke Kaneaster. She was born in Mississippi in 1865, and she had 11 children. She and her husband moved from Georgia out West, and you can tell all the different places they lived by the birthplaces of their children.




Then comes my grandmother Hazel, who was Mary's youngest child. Hazel married a man several years older than her, and they ended up divorcing. She raised her two daughters on her own, opening a beauty parlor to support herself and the girls. Hazel married three more times and was widowed three times. Her last husband, Bill Galloupe, was the only one of her husbands that I remember, and he was by far my favorite grandfather. They homesteaded land in the Southern California desert, and it was Grampa Bill who gave me my first opportunity to drive a car--at the ripe old age of 8. Fortunately it was on a private dirt road.




The next generation is my mother's. Doris Lorraine was the youngest of Hazel's two daughters. She married my father, and they were very happy for the nearly twenty years they were married. Mom died of complications after surgery to remove a brain tumor. She was 41.




Then there's me. I have given birth to five children (and am stepmother to another). My first husband died in 1981, leaving me with two children under four. I married Ed, and we had three boys together. I remember feeling that I'd really accomplished something when I managed to live longer than my mother, who died when I was 14.

The following is a picture of me around Christmas of my senior year of high school. I graduated early, and this was taken at a party I hosted to say good bye to my friends from school, as I went to college the next month. The dress I'm wearing had belonged to my mother.




Then comes my daughter Erin. She married her high school sweetheart (right out of high school), and they've struggled to get him through school while trying to raise a family. They are really amazing. They moved to Hawaii last year, and I miss them terribly.




Erin has two daughters, Sienna and Madelyn. It's fun that I get to see and talk with them on Skype, but I can't hug and kiss them.





And I think it's fun to see how the various generations sometimes resemble each other quite a bit. The following picture is me as a baby. Can you see a resemblance to any of the above pictures (besides my own, obviously).



And what about this little lady?

Blood Pressure Woes

Poor Ed. The medication they gave him that was supposed to help with the migraines and as a side effect help lower his blood pressure actually gave him terrible headaches. I've been making him do cardio with me in the mornings to help lower his blood pressure. He went to have his first anniversary appointment with the lung doctor (after the blood clots last March), and Ed's blood pressure was 160/110!!! That's UP!!

Grrrr

ETA: Ed saw the homeopath who's been able to help him with a lot of stuff the traditional docs haven't, and the homeopath's test says Ed's been severely exposed to this.

Makes absolute sense as Ed's been doing a lot of plumbing projects as a handyman, and he's dreadfully allergic to molds.

Life is Short

On Friday evening, my son Paul's brother-in-law died suddenly at the ripe old age of 24 of an apparent aneurysm. My heart goes out to Kelsey and her family at their time of loss.

God's finger touched him, and he slept.
~~Lord Alfred Tennyson

It's only when we truly know and understand that we have a limited time on earth -- and that we have no way of knowing when our time is up, we will then begin to live each day to the fullest, as if it was the only one we had.
~~Elisabeth Kubler-Ross

The word UP

I have no idea where I got this but I found it after stashing it away. It's SO true:

There is a two-letter word that perhaps has more meanings than any other two-letter word, and that is "UP."

It's easy to understand UP, meaning toward the sky or at the top of the list, but when we awaken in the morning, why do we wake UP? At a meeting, why does a topic come UP? Why do we speak UP and why are the officers UP for election and why is it UP to the secretary to write UP a report?

We call UP our friends. And we use it to brighten UP a room, polish UP the silver, we warm UP the leftovers and clean UP the kitchen. We lock UP the house and some guys fix UP the old car. At other times the little word has real special meaning. People stir UP trouble, line UP for tickets, work UP an appetite, and think UP excuses. To be dressed is one thing but to be dressed UP is special.

And this UP is confusing: A drain must be opened UP because it is stopped UP. We open UP a store in the morning but we close it UP at night.

We seem to be pretty mixed UP about UP! To be knowledgeable about the proper uses of UP, look the word UP in the dictionary. In a desk-sized dictionary, it takes UP almost 1/4th of the page and can add UP to about thirty definitions. If you are UP to it, you might try building UP a list of the many ways UP is used. It will take UP a lot of your time, but if you don't give UP, you may wind UP with a hundred or more. When it threatens to rain, we say it is clouding UP. When the sun comes out we say it is clearing UP.

When it rains, it wets the earth and often messes things UP.

When it doesn't rain for awhile, things dry UP.

One could go on and on, but I'll wrap it UP, for now my time is UP, so............ Time to shut UP.....!

Irish Thought

May those who love us, love us.
And for those who don't love us,
May God turn their hearts.
And if he can not turn their hearts,
May he turn their ankles,
So we may know them by their limping.

Visit with Neurologist

The MRI looks relatively good. The white spots are nonspecific white matter. They can be caused by migraines, diabetes, head injury, and high blood pressure. They could be recent additions or have been there for 50 years. Unless there are a lot of them, they don’t increase the risk of stroke. The white spots are probably related to Ed’s migraines, but there’s no way to make them go away. If another MRI is done in a year or two, they will probably be there.

Ed’s blood pressure was 158/98.

Ed’s sharp increased pain and frequency of migraines and memory loss is suspicious because of the high blood pressure. The doctor recommended a Calcium Channel Blocker, which is a preventive migraine medication and one side effect is it lowers blood pressure. Ed will need to take it every day to help prevent migraines.

The doc also prescribed a more in-depth neuropsychological test to help determine the cause of the memory loss. Poor Ed’s on so many meds right now that they could be causing some of the memory loss.

The doctor did not mention MS. While he cannot rule out Alzheimer’s, he does not think it’s likely the cause.

Making Good Decisions

At work we're reading an interesting book called "Crucial Conversations - Tools for talking when stakes are high" by Kerry Patterson, Joseph Grenny, Ron McMillan, and Al Switzler. It presents some interesting things to consider. Here's an excerpt from page 4:

For instance, consider a typical crucial conversation. Someone says something you disagree with about a topic that matters to you and the hairs on the back of your neck stand up. The hairs you can handle. Unfortunately, your body does more. Two tiny organs seated neatly atop your kidneys pump adrenaline into your bloodstream. You don’t choose to do this. Your adrenal glands do it, and then you have to live with it.

And that’s not all. Your brain then diverts blood from activities it deems nonessential to high-priority tasks such as hitting and running. Unfortunately, as the large muscle of the arms and legs get more blood, the higher-level reasoning sections of your brain get less. As a result, you end up facing challenging conversations with the same equipment available to a rhesus monkey.

What struck me was how many times I've been in this exact situation and later wondered why I hadn't handled the situation better. Well, funny enough the book says why on page fun.

The truth is, you were real-time multitasking with a brain that was working another job. You're lucky you didn't suffer a stroke.

Okay. These guys just make me laugh! This is great stuff.